Liberty Controlled: Institutional Settings of the East European Neo-avant- garde

By Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Published in Doublespeak: Hungarian Art of the 1960s and 1970s, edited by Sándor Hornyik, Edit Sasvári and Hedwig Turai (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018)

Across Eastern Europe the neo-avantgarde was characterized by a desire to experiment with innovative artistic forms and test the boundaries of the established institutional structures, mirroring the
revolutionary mood of 1968. At the same time, the neo-avant-garde was obliged to negotiate its position within the complex systems of control and containment devised by the socialist state. This essay examines the sites of dissemination of nonconformist artistic practices within institutional settings, which were developed through a process of arbitration between the divergent interests of artists and the state authorities.